So my last week of traveling got cancelled since I finally caught the dreaded Covid. It took me 3.5 years so that is another thing I can mark off my bucket list! Luckily, with the last variant, it amounted to little more than a cold. It did disrupt my sleeping and eating though which seems to me so strange.So between those two things, I'm a bit of a mess. It's also kept me out of the studio for two weeks which is a bummer. Because of that...I am re-running a post I did on value. The reason I chose value is that I think it's the most important element in designing your own work. No matter if you're a quilter who does your own original work or one that chooses fabric for someone else's pattern, value is an important skill.
So here is the post I wrote 8 years ago.
Okay, I admit it, I've been lazy and it's getting harder and harder to get into my studio. I could blame a lot of things - domestic tasks. working full time, getting Tessa back into the routine of her senior year. But honestly, I think it's me.
Sometimes after a big project, it's hard to get back into the swing of things. So I thought I would take it easy this time.
That said, with the mood I'm in, I didn't want to over-exert myself looking for something new. I know I want to play around with simple shapes and keep working on my abstract. . . but after that it is kinda of up in the air. Luckily, I keep a pinterest board of inspiration. Even when I'm lazy, I still manage to keep adding to my boards.
This time it led me to some modern architectural pictures which I found very cool. Using them as the foundation of inspiration, I wanted to abstract them out without a lot of fuss. Now I could go through tracing them and then doing value drawings by hand. Why expend all that energy?
Instead, I used an online site - LunaPic - to help me manipulate the images. I could use my photoshop but I always find it a little bulky. This online source was easy and very intuitive to use. For my purposes today I just grayed out the picture (took the saturation of color down to 0) and pixelated them. Instant abstract value study!!! Easy-Peasy!!!
This was so fun I think I'll work on them a bit longer finding just the right one. I have an idea of what I want to do with that but I'll save them for another post!!
Hi Nina Marie, hope you feel better soon. Thanks for the post and the link to the tool. Take care.
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